When comparing Scratch vs ClojureScript, the Slant community recommends Scratch for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?”Scratch is ranked 16th while ClojureScript is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Scratch is:

Code is represented as [visual building blocks](http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-use-Scratch/) that makes it easy to understand how a program is put together.

Pros

Pro

Visual

Pro

Easy to learn

Scratch is designed to teach computational thinking rather than focus on specific syntax. It was designed specifically to be easy to learn for anyone over the age of 8.

Pro

Great starting point for kids

Scratch was developed specifically for kids ages 8 and up as an exciting way to introduce them to technology. It's designed to be easy to learn, but still provides good depth in computational thinking.

Pro

No need to be able to type

Pro

Can be used to create games

Pro

Highly structured

The language is highly structured. Therefore, it gives you the essentials of how to think like a programmer and teaches you good programming practices from early on, so you could write clean, working and readable code in the future.

Pro

Live interactive programming with figwheel

Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time.

Pro

Simple syntax

Pro

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server.

Pro

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece).

Pro

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries.

Pro

Can be used with React out of the box

Pro

Excellent build tools

Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment.

Pro

The Spec core library

From the creator of Clojure:Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure.Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation.

Pro

Excellent tools for web development

ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process.

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Cons

Con

Won't get you a job

Scratch is not a language used in the workplace. Instead it teaches computational thinking, helping to create a foundation to aid in learning other languages.

Con

Does not teach you programming

Learning Scratch might help you if you have high difficulty with logical thinking. However, starting with a proper programming language, especially an easy one, will give you the benefits of starting with something like Scratch and everything else.

Con

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language.

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